


Law of Motion

by tripwirealarm



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Post-Episode: s02e07 The Idiot's Lantern
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-20
Updated: 2015-05-20
Packaged: 2018-03-31 11:36:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3976597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tripwirealarm/pseuds/tripwirealarm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The truth is, the Doctor doesn't have to fantasize.  All he has to do is look.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Law of Motion

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Scullywolf, the best beta reader any writer could ask to have.

It’s impossible to calculate the odds when you can't quantify the variables.  Mathematically speaking, even Time Lords are slaves to statistics, to the physicality of the three-dimensional world, no matter how desperately they'd fought to free themselves of that yoke around their collective neck.

How long it takes for a person to cross a street, for example. How many seconds pass while a car sits at a red light, how often they travel down that street, the number of vehicles on the road at a given time, the varied rate of speed at which the car approaches the pedestrian, the exact pitch of angular velocity, the pounds of force at which a car strikes a human body in motion.  Whether something is a tragedy or miracle, it’s all in the variables.  

No one can predict the future this way.  For the Doctor, it’s much easier, if you want to call it that.  He doesn't have to calculate.  He doesn't have to carry the ones or change the base of a logarithm to solve for _x_.  All he has to do, if he’s so inclined, is watch.  

It’s another long goodnight in a long trend of them.  A chain of lingering goodbyes that aren’t goodbyes, but manage to feel distinctly like one every time. This time there’s Rose Tyler in a voluminous pink skirt, her hair pinned up, breathing softly into the fold of lapel during a long goodnight embrace outside her bedroom door.  The heat makes it through the cloth, a damp warmth on his skin, and there’s the impulse to squirm away from it.  There’s a swell of fondness, of bitterness, of regret--perhaps for the first time ever a wish that he could be something other than he is.  Impulses rise and submerge again, and it’s the feeling of being eaten alive.  A whole-body hunger that twists his stomach like a balloon animal.  

He'd left her alone again.  Reckless and impulsive, it’s like he can't quite get the hang of this still-new body, hyperkinetic and haptic as it is by default. He worries that standing still will give him too many chances to do things he’ll regret.

Rose draws back from their goodnight embrace, eyes wet but not spilling.  She smiles on reflex, but it doesn't reach her eyes and seeing it hurts, somehow, more than he expects.

“Goodnight, Doctor.”

He doesn't reply straight out, because he wants to apologize but doesn't know what to say he’s sorry for.  Because he’s sorry, he _is,_ no question, but why--well, somehow that’s less easy to pin down.  Certainly he’s sorry for leaving her, he’s sorry she’d gone however many hours without a face, he’s sorry that he breathes hot and cold with the same mouth, and worst of all that he _knows_ he does, but it’s the shame that he wants to apologize for, and that’s ridiculous.

Ridiculous because it should be a lack of shame that warrants an apology.  But not to her.  Why he wants to apologize to _her_ for every hot shiver that walks up his spine, every stray bestial thought that crawls through the filth on the floor of his cluttered mind, scattering like insects the moment they encounter light, it’s difficult to put a finger on beyond the crushing certainty that it’s all wrong.

Every obsessive sight calculation of the curve of her lumbar as it descends into her tailbone or the non-linear slope of a drop of sweat falling against friction along her sternum diminishes her, lessens who she is to him, the inestimable weight she holds in his regard.   Because she’s sunrise instead of sunset, something sanguine and bright, not the slowly darkening denouement of his post-war existence; starlight instead of twilight, a beginning instead of an end.  She’s a being of gold smoke and light, walking across time, touching wickedness and rendering it less than dust, and when his palms are itching to feel her skin under them, when his throat’s gone parched and the muscles along his spine are pulling tight in a kind of teeth-rattling, white-knuckled ardor that wrings his insides and robs him of breath, he’s making her less than she is.

And yes, he’s so sorry because he can’t help himself.  It’s as much an attraction as a hurricane is a kind of wind.  It’s attraction in the way the iron heart of a planet tows moons in orbit across darkness and distance.  Electromagnetism.  Gravity. Simple forces of nature.  Maybe it’s the kind of thing he should have expected to flower from what’s become far more intense than just a simple attachment, but in all truth, it had blindsided him.

This, he knows now, was why the Time Lords had wanted to be rid of bodies.  Existing beyond death was only a piece of it.  An ending to the indentured servitude to chemical reactions and entropy.  Sickness, aging, the incapacitating emotional trauma of living for millennia, and _this_ feeling.  They were reminders that even they had come from something lesser, all things they’d been raised to revile.  He hates that he’s come to understand them even a little more, those whom he had judged.   Ironically, it was something he hadn’t quite lived long enough to understand until now.  His previously existing definitions of love, of desire, at least as they pertained to himself, had been so stunningly myopic.  

He's an embarrassment, even if only in his own thundering mind.  Every minute he’s dragged in further by the ruthless undertow of this devotion--and by how much he wants to taste the remnants of that too-sweet sugar drink from the block party where it will still be clinging to the inside of her mouth.  He wants to tell her how it’s slowly strangling everything else, like a weed in a flowerbed, and soon it will be all that’s left of him, this constant aching want.  

As sudden as breaking a sweat--he kisses her.

Except he doesn’t.  

This is how it usually goes.  

 

It’s a kind of axiom of human interaction with the concept of time travel:  they will always use their own projected lifetime as a means of measurement.  Their life as a ruler, a sort of measuring tape that holds enough of their personal investment to make it all mean something.

As if it didn’t already.  

It’s something that never seems to escape their notice, a thought that always seems to arrive around the same time for all of them, when inevitably they disembark somewhere in the distant future: they are long dead.  Long dead, gone, buried or turned to ash, forever lost while he lives on into what they think is eternity.  And if not long dead then not yet born, a hundred--a thousand years distant from the time coordinate in which they take their first breath.  He’s long abandoned the notion he could set them straight, that they’d be able to understand that time doesn't work that way.

Sometimes they ask.  How it all works.  

Patience is as important to the concept of time reversal as entropy reduction, heat dissipation, forward light cones, electromagnetic vector potentials, Maxwell stress tensors.  He could start at zero and talk for hours and barely scratch the surface, so instead, he’s always made a point of boiling it down to perceptions of how time works instead of trying to hazard an actual, empirical explanation.

Humans, they never want the facts anyway.  He never goes into transactional interpretation, the emission-absorption process and the illusion of time symmetry in atemporal wavefunctions.  He doesn't bring up that the question isn't if a tree falls in the forest and whether it makes a sound with no one to hear it, but rather if it fell at all.  If it will fall, could fall, or if anyone even gives a damn.  

Watch a bird land on a wire.  Its perception of time is tailored to its existence; its spatial dimensions and speed of flux are uniquely its own.  A mayfly lives a lifetime in a single Earth-day.  A sequoia breathes the air in silence for 500 years, stretching slowly toward the sky but never reaching that periwinkle ceiling and all of them, they exist forever.

They exist forever in the time they lived, time just a duration quantifier in a set of highly specific directions to a physical location.  Humanity with its limited lifespan, forever repeating how special their mere fleeting hours of breath render their experiences, each of them unknowingly living forever, encapsulated in the coordinates of the moments and spaces where they exist, their energy enduring long after their days as a conglomeration of tissue and liquid have passed.  They exist forever in the moments they were together.  Permanent fixtures of timespace.

That’s all they ever really want to know anyway.  It’s better that they don’t understand, really, what he can see.  How he can see it.  How many dimensions his brain interprets physical space in would only pervert the very convenient illusion that he’s like they are.  He looks as human as they.  It wouldn't really do for them to understand how much he is not.

He’s no bird on a wire.  His own complex spatial dimensions exist in a manifold doubled in comparison to most living things, his unique sense of time passing more physical, his transactional interpretation of absorption points visual without being connected to structures of the eye. The physicality of the fourth dimension is just that.  He can see the advanced and retarded waves cancelling each other out; he can see the junctions.  He can see the could-be’s and the might-be’s and the meanwhiles.  The prospective forward light cone of every moment, every existing variable that can’t be calculated within in the microseconds they are available.  In his very intricate mind’s eye, he can see what could ever happen, if only he dares to stop and look.

And increasingly, every additional event-marker for which she’s present in his life, he can see less and less of them in his Rose-Tyler-shaded periphery.  Possibilities.  He knows what it means, even if he refuses to acknowledge it.

Fewer timelines means more of them ending.  Vanishing from his sight in relation to the variables included.  The variable being, in this case, Rose Tyler.

Fewer timelines means he looks at what’s left more carefully. More than he wants.  More than he, by any account, ever should.  

It’s an abuse of his privilege.  An absolute abuse of power, completely corrupt, and he should be ashamed every time he picks apart those threads and watches what happens if he lets himself slip.  And he is, he’s so, so sorry, but not in the way he should be.

There are any number of variations.  Rose in his bedroom. Rose pushed up against the coral struts in the corridor outside the conservatory, in a field of apple grass under a scatter of foreign constellations with his shoulder blades coming together under her hands.  It happens mid-sentence, mid-peril, post-peril, in comfort and celebration, on a library sofa, on the grating in the console room, against a tree or in copper-based peridot green beach sand.  

Tonight, it’s Rose in the jumpseat with her knees on either side of his hips, her voluminous skirt bunched up and falling around them both, a kind of billowing pink curtain that obscures what’s happening beneath.  The pump and flex of her tensor fascia latae under his quaking, gripping hands.  

The truth is, the Doctor doesn’t have to fantasize.  All he has to do is look. Trying to come to terms with that fact, it’s like being slapped and kissed at the same time.  It’s like a kind of explosion, ringing to the heavens like the firework death-scene of a white dwarf, and at the same time, like the sound of someone dropping a needle on a marble floor.

Because for every moment he spends feeling squeezed into his own skin, everything too tight and too hot, claustrophobic, every withheld exhalation feeling like it will produce a lungful of steam like breathing out in a frigid night, a white ghost spiraling out toward the cold stars--there’s a corresponding, carefully unchosen moment where he acts.  Instead of holding his breath it’s the exhale, the equal and opposite reaction.  There’s something shameful in every one of those bottled breaths, a carnal recoil to a deeper affection, like a kind of aftershock.  It’s a whole new law of motion, the kind Newton hadn't bothered to warn him about.

She’s an ache between his lungs, between his legs.  She’s the smell of smoke, vague but everywhere.  Like a song he can't get out of his head.  She’s blood under his fingernails.

It’s eight minutes now since they've said goodnight, Rose retiring to her bedroom with sad, tired eyes and a distracted hand to her own cheek.  He can’t blame her.  He doesn't know what it feels like to lose one’s face, and he’s awfully sorry that she does.  He’s awfully sorry about a lot of things.

“Goodnight, Doctor,” she'd said, with wet eyes.  

And he’d seen it.  Again, he'd caught a glimpse of what could have been.  What had been, in some respects, or rather what would have been if he'd only had the courage or idiocy to reach out and take it.  A kiss, nothing he’s biologically programmed to want without very specific and intricate context.  

A kiss and far more besides-- something he’s even less inclined to pursue in most cases.   A kiss with her hands making an enthusiastic mess of his period-accurate hairstyle, the jingle of his trousers being tugged open, useless words swallowed in the wet crush of mouths. The feeling of his eyes squeezing shut, the double-time hammering of his pulse, the clinging velvet squeeze of her body around his and the kind of relieved gust of almost laughter that accompanies it. The feeling is that gravity is losing its grip on them. The faster they move, the more breathless and urgent it becomes, the more likely they are to just to slip out of orbit, both of them like renegade moons spiraling into the dark, the gargantuan and infinitesimal machinery of the cosmos grinding to a halt all around them.  

It’s just a flash of a timeline, but in the physical plane, his heart matches up with every rabbit-fast beat.  His mouth goes dry while it entertains the fourth dimensional ghost of Rose Tyler’s tongue.  There’s the fading crawl of pleasure up his spine while he pushes it all away, doesn’t follow it to its end more out of a duty toward self-preservation than self-respect.

In the cold, dry throb of sound in the console room, he stands with his damp palms flat on the console, bearing himself up against the pull of relative gravity.  There may be fewer and fewer timelines, but with the loss of variables they increasingly harbor the same constants:  his eventual submission, and his eventual solitude.  

He’s that tree falling in the forest.  He’s crossing a street with a car speeding toward him.  It’s either a tragedy or a miracle, but it’s impossible to calculate the odds when you can't quantify the variables.  

One way or another, it won't be long now.

 


End file.
